When the question arises "How many R-users there are?", the consensus
seems to be that there is no valid method to address the question. The
thread "R-business case" from 2004 can be found here:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2004-March/047606.html
I did not see any material revision to that conclusion during the
recent discussion of the New York Times article on the r-challenge to
SAS.
Gmane tracks the number of r-help activity (I realize not what you
asked for):
http://www.gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.r.general
The distribution of r-packages is, well ... distributed:
http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html
At least one of the participants in the 2004 thread suggested that it
would be a "good thing" to track the numbers of downloads by package.
I have not heard of any such system being installed in the mirror
software and I see nothing that suggests data gathering in the CRAN
Mirror How-to:
http://cran.r-project.org/mirror-howto.html
On the other hand I am not part of R-core, so you must await more
authoritative opinion since a 5 year-old thread and amateur
speculation is not much of a leg to stand on.
There are lexicographic packages for R. One approach to a de novo
analysis would be to do some sort of natural language analysis of the
r-help archives counting up either package names with non-English
names or close proximity of the words "library" or "package" to
package names that overlap the 30,000 common English words. That would
have the danger of inflating counts of the packages with the least
adequate documentation or a paucity of good worked examples, but there
are many readers of this list who suspect that new users don't look at
the documentation, so who knows?
--
David Winsemius
On Mar 7, 2009, at 2:57 PM, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
I would like to get some idea of which R-packages are popular, and
what R is
used for in general. Are there any statistics available on which R
packages
are downloaded often, or is there something like a package-survey?
Something
similar to http://popcon.debian.org/ maybe? Any tips are welcome!
-----
Jeroen Ooms * Dept. of Methodology and Statistics * Utrecht University
Visit http://www.jeroenooms.com www.jeroenooms.com to explore some
of my
current projects.
--
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PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
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David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT
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